Over the years many a rock performer has turned to the written word, which has left us shelves full of books by artists as disparate as Bob Dylan, John Lydon, and Henry Rollins, to name just a few. In my opinion, though, the greatest vein of "rock'n'roll writing" has come out of what is now called the New York punk movement of the 1970s.

An amazingly eclectic collection of styles and personalities featuring none of the three-chord conformity that symbolized so much later music that existed under that moniker, this scene produced some of the most strikingly original rock'n'roll ever made. And it's these wide-open values that make its still expanding literary wing so fascinating.

Arguably the most interesting writer to emerge from the era is Richard Hell. In the years since he abandoned his musical career, this former singer-bassist-songwriter for the bands Television, The Heartbreakers, and the Voidoids, has transformed himself into an essayist, poet, and novelist of considerable worth. His best known perhaps most representative works are his two fascinating novels Go Now and Godlike, works that respectively chronicle the life and times of a self-absorbed junkie rocker and retell the Rimbaud-Verlaine story in the form of a doomed homosexual relationship between two New York poets in the early 1970s. Also of interest is Hot and Cold, a collection of poems, song lyrics, notebook excerpts, drawings, and assorted other jottings, which to a large degree lay bare Hell's soul and influences.

Other examples of luminaries from this scene who have also turned out worthwhile books are singer Patti Smith, and Dee Dee Ramone, the late bassist for the Ramones. Smith, who was a poet before her musical career took off, has put out a number of poetry and prose volumes, which show that her incendiary talent as a song lyricist can often be translated to the printed page with much of its power and vision in tact. Dee Dee Ramone's literary success, however, is a bit more surprising. Though a wonderful songwriter, Dee Dee was also a classic rock'n'roll enfant terrible whose attention span would not seem to lend itself to the writing of books.

Still, late in his short life he managed to produce Legend of a Rock Star: A Memoir - The Last Testament of Dee Dee Ramone and the novel Chelsea Horror Hotel, which together form a charmingly rough-hewn and disarmingly honest look at the darker side of the musician's life.

Another major writer I'd argue should be included in this group is Jim Carroll. With books such as Living at the Movies and The Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll was actually well established as a poet and prose writer several years before the New York punk movement coalesced. But with the Jim Carroll Band he later dove headfirst into this scene showing that both as a musician and a writer he belonged with this group, as his earlier alternately tough and tricksy books had predicted much of what early New York punk would become.

As punk rock later transformed itself into a kind of suburban cult of violence, the type of people who formed this initial New York scene not surprisingly began to drop out of the movement. It's heartening to know, though, that their vision has found a home in the literary world, that there's such a thing as punk literature to remind us in the book biz that rules are meant to be broken and that artistry and adherence to one's vision are values that still have a place in a rapidly homogenizing world.